Copyright in the U.S.A. by G. A. Birmingham
Our village used to be one of the quietest in England. We prided ourselves that nothing ever happened there to excite or worry us in any way. Colonel Challenger, of the Royal Engineers, retired, often congratulated the vicar, who is upwards of sixty-five years of age, on the unbroken peace which we enjoyed. The vicar used to remind me, once a fortnight or so, that we owed our happiness largely to the fact that we were eight miles from a railway station. When I met Hankly, a retired Indian judge, in the post office I invariably pointed out to him that our lot would be much less pleasant if we lived in a neighbourhood where tennis parties were rife or among people who expected us to turn out in the evenings after dinner to play cards. Lord Manby, who owns the village and all the country round it, used to pay a visit to his home every year and ask us each to lunch with him once. We all accepted these invitations, but we told each other that they were a horrible nuisance and a most disagreeable break in the monotony of our lives. I think we were all quite honest and really believed that we were perfectly happy.
Then Mrs. Clegg C. Mimms rented the Manor House from Lord Manby, and all peace came to an end for us. She described herself on her visiting cards as "the Honourable Mrs. Mimms," and that disturbed us to begin with. We had to meet each other pretty frequently to discuss how she could be the Honourable Mrs. anything. She was plainly and unmistakably an American, and the vicar was of opinion that, since there are no titles in the American Republic, neither Mrs. Mimms nor her late husband could be the descendant of a lord. Hankly, who has seen a great deal of the world, told us that American ambassadors are styled the Right Honourable, and that Mrs. Mimms's husband might have been an ambassador. The Colonel maintained that ambassadors are like bishops and cannot share their official titles with their wives, particularly after they are dead. My own view was that if Mrs. Mimms wanted to be styled "the Honourable" it would be discourteous to deny her the title.
We had hardly settled down again after deciding this point when Mrs. Mimms upset us still more seriously. She gave a Christmas Tree to the village children. At first we thought that this would not matter to any one except the vicar. We were mistaken about that. Mrs. Mimms made us all help. The Colonel and I spent a long afternoon on a step-ladder sticking candles on the branches. Hankly, who is a lean, yellow little man, was made to dress himself up as "Father Christmas." We got no dinner on the evening of the party, and very nearly had to dance with the children afterwards. The presents which Mrs. Mimms distributed to the children were of the most gorgeous and expensive kind. We all agreed that she must be enormously rich, and the Colonel said that she would demoralise the whole village.
She certainly demoralised us. We found ourselves invited to dinner at the Manor House twice, sometimes three times, a week, and had a standing invitation to supper every Sunday night. It was no use refusing the invitations. I tried that twice; but Mrs. Mimms simply came round to my house in her motor and fetched me. The Colonel complained bitterly. He has been writing a book on Chhota Nagpur ever since I knew him, and he said that he hated being interrupted in the evenings. He only dined with Mrs. Mimms in order to avoid unpleasantness with his wife, who wanted to go. Hankly said plainly that Mrs. Mimms had a very good cook, and we all came in the end to accept that as our excuse for dining with her.
It is, I know, scarcely credible, but last Easter she dragged us into private theatricals. By that time we had agreed that Mrs. Mimms, in spite of her annoying lack of repose, was a very kind-hearted woman, and we did not wish to snub her in any way. My own part in the play let me in for a love scene with Mrs. Challenger, the most grotesquely absurd thing imaginable, for the lady is sixty at least and enormously fat. I should never have agreed to do it, however good-hearted Mrs. Mimms might be, if Hankly had not been cast for the part of an heroic Christian curate, and I knew he would look even more foolish than I did when I kissed Mrs. Challenger's left ear. Hankly hated being an heroic Christian curate and did not do the part at all well. We got through the theatricals in June, and after that, except for a couple of picnics every week, we had a comparatively quiet time until the war broke out. Mrs. Mimms broke out at the same time. All festivities, even picnics, stopped at once, of course, and we all began to take life very strenuously. Mrs. Mimms outdid us easily in every form of activity.
She began by erecting a flag-staff at the Manor House gates and hoisting an enormous American flag on it, the largest American flag I have ever seen. The Colonel, who had his motor decorated with a French and a Belgian flag as well as a Union Jack, said that Mrs. Mimms's Stars and Stripes were, under the circumstances, rather bad form. Hankly and I agreed with him, and we made the vicar speak to her about it. She explained to him that she had hoisted it entirely for our good. It was, so she told the vicar, and he told us, the only flag in the world which the Germans would respect, and that when the Uhlans entered our village we could all congregate in perfect safety under its folds. The Colonel was furious—we were all rather angry—at the idea that the Germans would ever set foot in England; but there was no denying that Mrs. Mimms meant to be kind when she hoisted the flag. Besides, she is a difficult woman to argue with, and we did not quite see how we could make her take the thing down.
Hankly and I more or less forgave her, though, as it appeared, the Colonel did not, when she came forward at a meeting summoned by the vicar and offered to turn the Manor House into a hospital for wounded soldiers. The generosity of her proposal actually staggered us. She intended, so she said—and I quite believe it—to turn out all the existing furniture of the house, fit the place up with the latest sanitary devices, hire two surgeons and a competent staff of nurses who should be under her own personal supervision. We at once wired to the War Office and expected to be thanked gratefully. As a matter of fact we never got any official acknowledgment of the offer at all. What we did get—or rather what Mrs. Mimms got—was a letter from Lord Manby's solicitor pointing out that the agreement under which she had taken the Manor House did not allow of her getting rid of the furniture or using the place in any way except as an ordinary dwelling.
I thought that Lord Manby was a little unsympathetic, and that the War Office might very well have replied to our telegram, but the Colonel took quite a different line. He said that Mrs. Mimms was an interfering old woman who deserved to be snubbed. We all hoped that after this set-back she would be a little subdued and allow us to manage our own war in our own way.
For a time she kept tolerably quiet. She contented herself with making shirts and subscribing to various funds like any ordinary woman. She was, so my wife told me, an amazingly rapid worker, and could turn out three shirts while any other woman in the village was making two. Her subscriptions were very generous. Gradually the whole activities of our village centred in the Manor House. Mrs. Mimms put up another flag-staff and flew a large Red Cross from it. Working parties went on in her dining-room from morning to night, and hardly a day passed without a committee meeting. The vicar, Colonel Challenger, Hankly, and I were the committee, and we met whenever Mrs. Mimms summoned us. The vicar was supposed to preside, but it was Mrs. Mimms who suggested the things we did. The Colonel objected, in private, to every suggestion she made, but he never succeeded in carrying a point against her. Once or twice she got us into trouble. There was, for instance, a lot of ill feeling when we sealed up the village pump and set my chauffeur to keep guard over it with a gun, only allowing people to draw water for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. Mrs. Mimms had a theory that a German might come in an aeroplane and poison our water supply. That would have been a horrible thing: but the people in the village made a fuss about not being able to get at the pump. Tompkins, the innkeeper, who was particularly objectionable, said that he only used the water for washing and would rather have it poisoned than do without it.